Research Agenda¶

This page lists the paper currently in submission preparation and a set of follow-up ideas that can be built using the same underlying data: the BEC-SP pharmaceutical procurement panel (BEC group 65, São Paulo, 2009–2019) linked to the TJSP right-to-health litigation lake, with the urgent-procurement panel, the firm-buyer-item triples, reference prices, and the litigated/administrative classification of purchase orders already in hand. Each entry includes target-journal options with honest reviewer-style probabilities of revise-and-resubmit (R&R).

Reading the R&R probability columns

R&R = invited to revise and resubmit (not Accept). For a JPubE short-paper track the dynamics are unusual: the short-paper format tends toward conditional-accept-or-reject rather than a long R&R cycle, so the headline R&R rate is low even when the eventual outcome is favourable. "Strong fit" is a reviewer-side reading of the journal's recent publication mix; "Secondary fit" is a stretch. All probabilities assume a clean manuscript at submission and a single São Paulo jurisdiction.

1. Current paper (in submission preparation)¶

Sourcing under Sanctions: Judicial Urgency and Pharmaceutical Procurement Costs¶

Authors: Darcio Genicolo-Martins & Paulo Furquim de Azevedo (Insper)

Version: v10 (May 2026, JPubE short paper) manuscript PDF · online appendix

Distinctive contributions:

Separating same-firm pricing from supplier-set sourcing — standard procurement comparisons confound the price an incumbent supplier charges with the process that determines which supplier wins. The paper separates the two: a within firm-buyer-item test isolates same-firm pricing (β̂ = 0.035, SE 0.041 — no broad same-firm markup in deep repeated urgent markets), while winner-switching and scale evidence measure the sourcing margin. The cost of legal urgency in deep markets is fragmented sourcing — lost scale and supplier-set reallocation — not a broad same-firm markup, with a residual within-firm gap persisting in the earlier period (the quantity dimension reflecting scale, not same-firm pricing).
Opening the procurement black box behind right-to-health litigation — the literature on health litigation studies how much the state spends and who gets access. This paper studies how the state buys when delivery is compelled under sanctions: the unit of analysis is the procurement process — order size, bidder participation, and the winning supplier set — rather than only the fiscal aggregate.
A judicial-enforcement form of passive waste — one-sided sanctions secure delivery but weaken the routines that aggregate demand and match buyers with suppliers. The paper documents a form of passive waste that arises from the enforcement mechanism itself, and maps it to instruments that restore aggregation while preserving delivery.

Headline numbers. Lee-bounded litigated-over-administrative price gap of [15.9%, 21.1%]; within firm-buyer-item administrative coefficient of 0.035 (SE 0.041); administrative orders 3.3× larger; modal winner differs in 70.2% of item-buyer pairs; fiscal procurement-cost implication of **$27.8M/year** ($23.9M–$31.7M), which is a procurement-cost calculation, not a full welfare estimate.

Target journals:

Tier	Journal	R&R prob.	Fit rationale
1 (primary)	JPubE — short paper track	15–25%	The natural home: a procurement-mechanism result on right-to-health litigation with a clean separation of pricing from sourcing is JPubE-core. The short-paper track resolves more often as conditional-accept-or-reject than as a long R&R, so the R&R rate is mechanically low; the binding constraints referees will press are single-jurisdiction external validity and the selected, larger administrative comparison (the closest feasible urgent-procurement comparison, not a random control).
2	AEJ: Policy	30–40%	Strong fit for the policy recast — preserve delivery, restore aggregation under legal urgency — and for the fiscal procurement-cost implication tied to a real institutional setting. AEJ:Policy values the design contribution and would give a fuller R&R cycle than a short-paper track.
3 (secondary)	J. Health Economics / Health Affairs	25–35%	Secondary fit through the right-to-health-litigation angle; JHE would want the health-access margin engaged more directly, and the contribution here is procurement mechanism rather than health outcomes, so the framing is a stretch relative to Tiers 1–2.

Current submission gating constraints:

Single-jurisdiction limitation — every estimate lives in São Paulo BEC group 65. A second procurement jurisdiction or state platform replicating the litigated-over-administrative sourcing margin would push R&R toward the upper end at every tier (see Idea 2.3).
Selected administrative comparison — the administrative urgent channel is the closest feasible urgent-procurement comparison, but it is selected and larger, not random or clean. The Lee bounds discipline this selection rather than removing it.
Procurement-cost, not welfare — the fiscal figure is a procurement-cost implication that excludes health benefits, search costs, and compliance benefits; it is not the value of scaling back legal enforcement.

2. Follow-up paper ideas¶

The agenda below distinguishes projects that deliberately overlap with the current paper from projects that use the same empirical platform to answer a different public-economics question. The first two ideas (2.1) extend the v10 pricing-versus-sourcing mechanism; the next three (2.2) use the same platform to ask different public-economics questions; the final three (2.3) deepen the mechanism or sharpen identification, and each carries a load-bearing data or design assumption that is flagged explicitly below. None of the projects in 2.2–2.3 should be framed as appendices or robustness exercises for the current manuscript.

2.1 Ideas with direct overlap¶

These projects are closest to the current paper. Their main risk is that a referee may read them as extensions rather than standalone contributions unless the mechanism or external-validity payoff is made explicit.

Idea	Research question	Planned structure	Target journal	R&R probability
A. Market depth and supplier leverage under legal urgency	When does legal urgency become a same-firm pricing problem rather than a sourcing problem? The current paper shows no broad same-firm markup in deep repeated urgent markets, with a residual within-firm gap in thinner or earlier markets. A dedicated paper would model and test the boundary between these regimes.	1. Classify item-buyer markets by depth, recurrence, molecule contestability, and supplier concentration. 2. Estimate within firm-buyer-item pricing gaps by depth strata. 3. Test whether winner switching, order size, and bidder participation explain where markups reappear. 4. Conclude with a targeting rule for urgent-procurement capacity.	J. Health Economics or Health Economics	25–35%
B. External validity of sourcing under sanctions	Does the pricing-versus-sourcing mechanism travel beyond São Paulo BEC? The current paper's most predictable limitation is the single-jurisdiction setting. A second platform would test whether court-mandated urgency disrupts aggregation and supplier matching in a different procurement environment.	1. Port the litigated/administrative classifier and procurement pipeline to another state or ComprasNet. 2. Rebuild the urgent-vs-ordinary, Lee-bound, within-firm, and winner-switching modules. 3. Compare the mechanism across institutional settings. 4. Identify which features of procurement capacity moderate the sourcing margin.	Journal of Public Economics short paper or AEJ: Policy	20–30% JPubE; 30–40% AEJ: Policy

2.2 Ideas without direct overlap¶

These projects should not be framed as "more results" from the current paper. They use the broader litigation-procurement data infrastructure to ask different questions about courts, state capacity, and public service delivery.

Idea	Research question	Planned structure	Target journal	R&R probability
C. Judicial demand and administrative learning	Do purchasing units adapt after repeated court-mandated demand, or does litigation create persistent dependence on fragmented urgent procurement? Unlike the current paper, the object is dynamic state capacity, not the contemporaneous procurement-cost margin.	1. Build buyer-year exposure measures to repeated legal urgency. 2. Estimate dynamic changes in order aggregation, framework-like purchasing routines, supplier recurrence, and emergency dependence. 3. Use timing diagnostics and sensitivity analysis to separate learning from selection into high-litigation buyers. 4. Interpret the results as capacity accumulation or administrative scarring.	Journal of Policy Analysis and Management or Public Administration Review	25–35%
D. The distributional geography of right-to-health procurement	Who benefits from court-mandated pharmaceutical procurement, and do procurement responses differ across poorer and richer municipalities? This paper would move from procurement technology to distributional incidence.	1. Link purchasing units and court cases to municipal socioeconomic measures and health-system capacity. 2. Measure whether legal urgency is concentrated in richer, legally sophisticated, or medically underserved areas. 3. Compare procurement prices, access timing, and sourcing margins across local capacity strata. 4. Discuss whether litigation equalizes access or amplifies territorial inequality.	World Development, Health Affairs, or Social Science & Medicine	20–30%
E. Reference prices, legal urgency, and price ceilings	Do statutory or administrative reference prices constrain procurement under legal urgency, or do urgent purchases bypass the price-discipline role of benchmarks? This is a price-regulation paper rather than a court-procurement mechanism paper.	1. Combine BEC item prices with CMED/reference-price measures. 2. Estimate bunching, pass-through, and exceedance around reference-price thresholds by ordinary, administrative urgent, and litigated urgent regimes. 3. Test whether urgency weakens benchmark discipline differently across competitive and concentrated molecules. 4. Derive implications for benchmark design under emergency demand.	Journal of Health Economics or International Journal of Industrial Organization	20–30%

2.3 Ideas that deepen the mechanism or sharpen identification¶

These three projects stay inside the litigation-procurement setting but each isolates a channel the current paper bundles, or improves on the design the current paper relies on. They are listed with explicit contributions and an honest, reviewer-side R&R prior conditional on the load-bearing assumption in the "Key risk" line holding. The probabilities are calibrated to the same short-paper dynamics and single-jurisdiction drag described above, so they sit deliberately below the optimistic end.

F. The supply side of court-mandated procurement: specialization and rents¶

Research question. Does one-sided judicial enforcement create a specialized supplier fringe that captures rents through speed, or are litigated urgent orders absorbed by the existing supplier pool at competitive terms? The current paper measures winner switching; it does not characterize who the urgent winners are or on what terms they supply.

Planned structure.

Characterize the supplier ecosystem of litigated urgent orders — entry, exit, concentration, and the share of "repeat urgency winners" — using the firm-buyer-item panel.
Test whether a subset of firms specializes in urgent delivery (share of revenue from urgent orders; recurrence across buyers and molecules).
Decompose the litigated price gap into a competitive-supply component and a specialization component, by molecule contestability and buyer recurrence.
Relate specialization to market depth and to the within-firm pricing result from v10, distinguishing rents from a compensating differential for speed.
Policy: whether pre-qualified urgent-supply frameworks would compress the specialization component while preserving delivery.

Original contributions to the literature.

Moves the right-to-health-litigation literature from demand-side fiscal cost to supply-side market structure — who supplies under enforcement, and whether enforcement concentrates supply.
Documents endogenous supplier specialization driven by an enforcement institution, complementing the procurement-IO literature on entry, participation, and auctions-versus-negotiations (Decarolis; Coviello–Mariniello; Bajari–Tadelis) with a setting where demand urgency is court-imposed rather than buyer-chosen.
Separates rents from a compensating differential for speed — a distinction the passive-waste framework (Bandiera–Prat–Valletti) leaves implicit when delivery is compelled.

Target journals.

Tier	Journal	R&R prob.	Fit rationale
1 (primary)	RAND J. Economics	12–20%	Best substantive fit for a supply-side market-structure result, but the toughest venue on the list: single-jurisdiction external validity and the rent-versus-differential decomposition will both be pressed hard.
2	Int. J. Industrial Organization	25–35%	Same contribution, more forgiving on jurisdiction breadth; the decomposition still has to be credible.
3 (secondary)	JEEA	20–30%	Fit through the institutions-and-market-structure angle; would want a sharper general lesson than "São Paulo pharmaceuticals."

Key risk. The rent-versus-differential split is make-or-break. Without an instrument or an explicit structural assumption, referees will read the "rent" as an unexplained residual correlated with order size — the same confound v10 works to break. Do not write this paper until the decomposition has a defensible identification argument.

G. The specification channel: text-as-data on order requirements under urgency¶

Research question. Do litigated urgent orders use narrower specifications (single-brand, restrictive justifications, tighter attribute lists) that mechanically shrink the bidder pool — i.e., is part of the competition loss a specification choice rather than only an order-size effect? v10 attributes thin participation largely to fragmented, smaller orders; this paper asks whether the written requirements are a separate lever.

Planned structure.

Extract specification tightness from BEC item descriptions (and editais where available) via NLP: brand naming, single-source justification, restrictive attribute counts.
Validate the text measure against realized bidder participation and against a held-out hand-coded sample.
Within firm-buyer-item, decompose the participation and price gaps into an order-fragmentation component and a specification-tightening component.
Test whether tightening rises with judicial urgency and falls with molecule contestability.
Implications for procurement design under emergency demand (specification flexibility versus restrictiveness).

Original contributions to the literature.

Separates two mechanisms the current paper bundles — fewer bidders because orders shrink versus fewer bidders because specifications tighten — a decomposition new to the health-litigation procurement setting.
Brings text-as-data (Gentzkow–Kelly–Taddy) to measure procurement specification restrictiveness at scale, where the contract-design literature has mostly relied on hand-coded contract features.
Connects the incomplete-contracts / specification-versus-flexibility tradeoff (Bajari–Tadelis) to enforcement-induced urgency, giving it a measurable empirical counterpart.

Target journals.

Tier	Journal	R&R prob.	Fit rationale
1 (primary)	JPubE — short paper track	12–20%	Core fit as a mechanism decomposition on the same setting, but the short-paper track resolves as conditional-accept-or-reject and the NLP measurement-validity bar is high; the R&R rate is mechanically low.
2	Management Science	20–30%	Values the text-as-data methodology and the procurement-design angle; would want the measure benchmarked carefully.
3 (secondary)	JLEO	25–35%	Fit through the contract-design lens; more tolerant of a single-setting application.

Key risk. The entire paper rests on the validity of the NLP specification measure. Without strong human validation and a placebo (specifications that should not respond to urgency), referees will treat the text measure as noise correlated with order size — exactly the confound the paper claims to break.

H. Sanction intensity as a continuous treatment: deadlines, daily fines, and the cost gradient¶

Research question. Within litigated orders, does the severity of the judicial sanction — shorter compliance deadline, larger daily fine (multa diária) — raise procurement cost and fragment sourcing, tracing a dose-response that the binary litigated-versus-administrative contrast cannot? A within-litigated gradient speaks directly to the selection critique that binds the main paper.

Planned structure.

Extract deadline and daily-fine intensity from TJSP decisions via NLP, with a validated extraction protocol.
Within litigated orders, relate sanction intensity to unit price, order size, bidder participation, and winner switching.
Exploit plausibly as-good-as-random variation in court or judge severity (relator assignment) as an intensity shifter — a judge-assignment IV design — after testing the assignment for balance.
Compare the intensive-margin gradient with the binary litigated-versus-administrative gap from v10.
Policy: which calibration of deadlines and fines secures delivery at least procurement cost.

Original contributions to the literature.

Upgrades identification. A within-litigated dose-response — and, if the assignment is clean, a judge-severity instrument — sidesteps the litigated-versus-administrative selection critique that constrains v10, isolating the enforcement-intensity channel rather than the enforcement-incidence channel.
Gives the "under the gun" mechanism a continuous treatment, quantifying the marginal procurement cost of sanction severity — new to both the right-to-health-litigation and the passive-waste (Bandiera–Prat–Valletti) literatures, which treat enforcement as a binary state.
Applies the judge-assignment / examiner-IV design tradition to procurement outcomes, extending a tool built for individual-level outcomes (incarceration, disability, bankruptcy) to a firm- and order-level procurement margin.

Target journals.

Tier	Journal	R&R prob.	Fit rationale
1 (primary)	JPubE	18–28%	Strongest fit on the list: an identification upgrade is exactly what referees press the main paper for, so the contribution lands. The binding constraint is whether relator assignment is truly as-good-as-random and whether the first stage is strong.
2	AEJ: Policy	30–40%	Values the policy-calibration framing (how to set deadlines and fines) and would run a fuller R&R cycle than a short-paper track.
3 (secondary)	JLEO / JLE	25–35%	Natural fit for the judicial-enforcement-as-design lens if the IV holds.

Key risk. Two assumptions are load-bearing: (i) deadline and daily-fine fields are reliably extractable from the TJSP lake, and (ii) relator assignment is as-good-as-random with a strong first stage. Verify both before committing — if either fails, the paper collapses to a weaker correlational dose-response and loses the identification advantage that is its entire reason to exist.

Last updated: 2026-05-25